Friday, November 18, 2011

Nobel Peace Prize for Cameroon in the offing

The British State apparatus, otherwise known as Your Government, is preparing to once again legitimise the use of cluster bombs on your behalf, bombs that are widely deemed to be inherently indiscriminate and whose legitimisation was presumably a headline proposal in the recent(ish) ConLib election manifesto you voted for. Oops, no, it wasn't.

Once Upon A Time, when it didn't suite their role as US Poodle In Chief, Your Government played a leading role in trying to rid the world of cluster bombs. Your Government was one of 111 countries that signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions and was on target to destroy its own stockpile, and had ordered the US military to remove any submunitions it holds on British soil. Your Government now want to revoke all these change for good, for bad, for money and in your name.

The Independent newspaper learnt that Your UK Government is supporting a Washington-led proposal that would permit the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a failure rate of less than one per cent. Well that's O.K. then, seems perfectly reasonable to me. (So - for approx. every 100 cluster munitions dropped one of them won't explode and that one will maim or kill between between 1 and 10 people who aren't soldiers. Fair enough or Enough's A Nough?)

Arms campaigners say the 1980 cut-off point is arbitrary, and that many modern cluster bombs have far higher failure rates on the field of battle than manufacturers claim. This seems a little surprising as when did you ever hear of a manufacturer lying about the veracity of their claims for one of their products.
Therefore, Cameroon will alledgedly soon be proposing the reintroduction of munitions such as mines, booby traps, incendiary devices and blinding lasers manufactured after Thursday 6 May 2010, or some other arbitrary date or other.

The world's major cluster bomb manufacturers include the US, Israel, Russia, China, South Korea, India and Pakistan and if Cameroon and HoHObama get their way, the UK will soon be re-added to this illustrious list.

Arms campaigners say the draft proposal would effectively legalise almost all cluster bombs and be a nail in the coffin of the hard-won cluster bomb ban, which is all but two years old. Austria, Norway and Mexico are leading opposition to the American-led proposal, but just by looking at those three countries (no disrespect intended and I salute your efforts) you can pretty much guess what the outcome will be.

In a briefing paper, the Cluster Munition Coalition – which campaigns against the weapons – said that every recorded incident of cluster bomb use since 2008 had involved submunitions that were manufactured after 1980.

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the remorseless creep of state control

Here is the Google Map which started the whole idea for this blog.

I started this blog by recording and attempting to show some of the ways in which the activity of the State is affecting you and yours in the brave new world of UK State Fascism from the tragic extreme of Jean Charles de Menezes to the surreal yet still very scary.

I am no longer updating the map as the madness of worldwide state and corporate control has sped away from my ability to keep up.

I am however morphing the posts into an ongoing series of creative pieces, taking original news from elsewhere and changing it in various ways - Serious Comment Through Artistic Intervention - find my favourites under the List of Rants tags.

Flip Flops, where one part, a name for instance, of two wildly different posts are swapped.

At A Quick Glance, where the first impression of what has been posted is different from the reality, but I go with the first impression anyway.

Future News where I take a post from elsewhere and extend it into the future with a quizzical eye attempting to see what may be in the year 2024.

State sponsored fear and distrust as seen through the twisted technological lens of petty officials and would be bureaucrats exist worldwide now. Always Ask Them Why.

It is increasingly difficult to explain just why 'you' should be concerned about State and Corporate Control and the all pervasive creeping Data State when talking to friends and acquaintances, whose first question has been along the lines of "How will all this affect me? Why should I and my family be concerned about all that?"

The presumption is that only terrorists or criminals need be afraid and that none of the radical changes to our laws and freedoms now coming to fruition will affect me will they?

Yes they will. They already are.

I have stopped updating the map but it remains out there in the world as a idiosyncratic memory. Enjoy.

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